Real-Time Identification of Knee JointWalking Gait as Preliminary Signal for Developing Lower Limb Exoskeleton
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Date
2021
Authors
Pamungkas, Daniel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract
An exoskeleton is a device used for walking rehabilitation. In order to develop a proper
rehabilitation exoskeleton, a user’s walking intention needs to be captured as the initial step of work.
Moreover, every human has a unique walking gait style. This work introduced a wearable sensor,
which aimed to recognize the walking gait phase, as the fundamental step before applying it into the
rehabilitation exoskeleton. The sensor used in this work was the IMU sensor, used to recognize the
pitch angle generated from the knee joint while the user walks, as information about the walking
gait cycle, before doing the investigation on how to identify the walking gait cycle. In order to
identify the walking gait cycle, Neural Network has been proposed as a method. The gait cycle
identification was generated to recognize the gait cycle on the knee joint. To verify the performance
of the proposed method, experiments have been done in real-time application. The experiments were
carried out with different processes such as walking on a flat floor, climbing up, and walking down
stairs. Five subjects were trained and tested using the system. The experiments showed that the
proposed method was able to recognize each gait cycle for all users as they wore the sensor on their
knee joints. This study has the potential to be applied on an exoskeleton rehabilitation robot as a
further research experiment.
Description
Keywords
exoskeleton